BookTok Shows How Fans Can Power Sales; Imagine What Could Be Done Without Copyright Anxiety

from the let-your-fans-market-for-you dept

A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well as plenty of background information about the BookTok phenomenon, it has the following perceptive comment from Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specializing in children's and young adult books:

“These ‘snapshot’ visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever. It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words.”

Attracting new – and especially new young – readers is something that publishers have long been striving for. And now, free of charge, BookTok creators are doing this for them, driving huge sales in many cases, as the Guardian explained:

Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. Users recently started filming themselves before and after reading the book, sobbing as they reached the finish line. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4,000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK, with well over half of those coming belatedly in 2021, after thousands of posts about it (#adamsilvera has been viewed 10.8m times).

BookTok is a wonderful demonstration of the power of user-generated content. Because it is made by ordinary people for ordinary people, it speaks directly in a way that no slick marketing campaign can hope to match. But inevitably, hanging over all such exciting experiments with the digital medium there will be “copyright anxiety” – a fear that during your explorations you might cross some invisible line that means you are breaking the law.

Think how many more sales of books, music, art, and films could be driven by new kinds of BookTok, appearing on multiple platforms, if only copyright allowed this kind of material to be used without the risk of legal threats, or of accounts being blocked. Ironically, it turns out that companies demanding stringent enforcement of copyright's unreasonable rules are ultimately harming themselves.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: advertising, booktok, copyright, culture, fans
Companies: tiktok

NSO Made Millions Selling Phone Hacking Tools To The Princes And Kings Of The United Arab Emirates

from the handing-more-power-to-the-unassailably-powerful dept

NSO Group can't get a break. Too bad. It really doesn't deserve one. The inability of the Israeli exploit purveyor to escape this endlessly negative news cycle is entirely its own fault. And each passing day seems to uncover something new and nasty about the tech company, which has built its business by seemingly selling to whoever wants to buy, no matter how morally repugnant.

The company's malware has been deployed by a variety of repeat human rights offenders to target journalists, critics, dissidents, religious leaders, opposition parties, and the occasional heads of state of their allies. To its own critics, NSO has issued contradictions: it is not responsible for how its customers use its products and that it does everything it can to prevent misuse of its products. The contradiction is baked in: NSO says it pulls access for misuse while claiming it has no "visibility" into its customers' activities.

It also says it does not sell its powerful malware to private entities. But the fine line between public and private entities is never finer than in the United Arab Emirates, where the allied rulers of the area are also private citizens -- kings and princes with access to a whole lot of wealth and a whole lot of power.

A prince can claim to be a government official and still behave like a private citizen. Take Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai. He's the king of Dubai. He's also in the middle of an extremely messy, somewhat public divorce from Princess Haya bint al-Hussein. His access to NSO's most popular phone exploit (Pegasus) allowed him to hack phones belonging to his ex, along with phones belonging to her legal reps.

But he's not the only UAE figurehead with NSO contracts. Israeli news agency Haaretz reports NSO has sold to other kings and princes who control parts of UAE: men who have plenty of private business that could benefit from a bit of phone hackery using tools obtained under the auspices of Official Government Business.

The Israeli cyber firm NSO sold its Pegasus mobile-phone hacking software to two different leaders of the United Arab Emirates – Abu Dhabi ruler Mohammed Bin Zayed and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Makhtoum.

TheMarker has learned that the price each of these clients paid in dollars is a seven- to eight-figure number.

It's not that UAE doesn't have national security and law enforcement agencies that would make better homes for phone hacking tools. (I mean comparatively…) The UAE has a federal police force and a joint national security agency that's supposed to handle the sorts of things (serious crime, terrorist activity) NSO swears up and down its customers are using its exploits to combat.

So, why sell the princes and kings, who have few obligations to the people they rule over… you know, since they're rulers rather than elected officials? Apparently, the answer is because they have millions to spend on phone hacking tools and a company willing to exchange goods and services for money while pretending to hold its nose, cover its eyes and ears, and act all defensive when people ask the why in the almighty fuck are they selling exploits to the United Arab Emirates, much less its literal ruling class?

NSO says publicly (and a lot more frequently in recent months) that it takes a hard line on the abuse of its products to violate human rights. But it says that after years of selling to rulers with long histories of extremely severe human rights violations. Both things can't be true. And a cursory Google search would give NSO all the due diligence it needs to refuse to sell to rulers (and government agencies) located in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. (Not to mention others with the same cavalier attitude towards life and liberty.)

Recent revelations are forcing NSO to put its money where its mouth is. With every new report of violations and use by human rights violators, the company is now obligated to yank access and cancel contracts. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it will be for the company to approach rulers who preside over areas where executions and disappearances of critics are commonplace. But suck it up, NSO. The best way to avoid having to tell brutal rulers their business is no longer welcome is to never welcome it in the first place.

Worse, the country NSO calls home may be partly to blame.

In some cases, including the sale of two systems to two separate rulers in the UAE, the Pegasus system was only sold following heavy pressure from the Israeli government, as part of the diplomatic warming between Israel and the UAE. Yet the system’s irregular use embarrassed NSO and caused the third bout of bad publicity the company has sustained since being blacklisted by the U.S. last week.

So, if the Israeli government feels any complicity in the current state of NSO affairs, it probably should send a couple of diplomats along to ensure the revocation of hacking power by NSO not only actually happens, but happens without part of the NSO sales force being disappeared for having the audacity to tell these half-patriarchy/half-oligarchy rulers to take their business elsewhere.

Filed Under: dubai, israel, malware, pegasus, spyware, surveillance, uae
Companies: nso group

Lots Of Big Media Companies Had Access To The Facebook Files; Only Gizmodo Decided To Put In The Work To Make Them Public

from the good-for-them dept

Over the last month or so, you've probably heard a lot about the Facebook Files or the Facebook Papers, which are the documents shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen with the media, starting with the Wall Street Journal, and then a rather reluctant "consortium" of seventeen big name US-based news organizations. The reluctance was apparent in the name of the Slack group created for all of the reporters working on the project: "Apparently We're A Consortium Now."

While I've been skeptical of some of the framing of the reporting on the papers, I still do generally believe it was a good thing to get this research out to the world -- even if I have little confidence that the media could ever do a good job conveying the story.

As news of the consortium broke, many people called out the fact that all of these big journalism organizations weren't actually releasing the documents they were going through themselves, often only describing them or quoting parts of them. Given that in a few cases where we've been able to see the full documents, it has appeared that some of the reporting was misleading or confused, this was a concern. And, of course, there were other concerns about the makeup of the consortium, and the fact that it was entirely based in the US.

That doesn't mean that it made sense to freely release all the documents to the public. There are plenty of reasonable concerns about privacy when you have a giant cache of internal documents. That's why it's a good thing to find out that Gizmodo has now taken on the task of making the Facebook Papers public, and doing so in partnership with a bunch of independent experts who will help Gizmodo's reporters sift through the documents and make sure that they're okay to be released:

Today, we see a strong public need can be served by making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors who are joining us to guide our work in preparing the papers for public release. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.

As Gizmodo notes, there are many reasons to carefully review the documents before releasing them:

More than for privacy, the documents require extra review to ensure we aren’t just handing groups of criminals and spies a roadmap to undermining the controls Facebook does have in place to detect propaganda aimed at spreading lies, hate, and fear. That would undermine any benefit the world stands to reap from this act of whistleblower justice.

The work is just beginning but we’re eager to start releasing documents as as possible. The first batch will likely consist of documents that warrant the least amount of redactions, just to get the ball rolling.

This is all good news. But it's a bit crazy that it's Gizmodo doing all this work. Gizmodo wasn't even a member of the original consortium and only joined after the first batch of stories went out. Also, Gizmodo is way smaller and with way fewer resources than many of the other members of the consortium, which includes the flush NY Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, the Associated Press, Politico, Wired and more.

The fact that it took a month for any of the members, let alone one of the smaller ones, to actually decide to put together the effort to release the papers is a damning statement on how many members of the consortium see their role in the media to be a gatekeeper to information, rather than providing the public access to information.

Filed Under: facebook files, facebook papers, reporting, transparency
Companies: facebook, gizmodo

South Korean Gov't Gave Millions Of Facial Photos Collected At Airports To Private Companies

from the PLEASE-DO-NOT-FEED-THE-ALGORITHMS dept

Facial recognition systems are becoming an expected feature in airports. Often installed under the assumption that collecting the biometric data of millions of non-terrorist travelers will prevent more terrorism, the systems are just becoming another bullet point on the list of travel inconveniences.

Rolled out by government agencies with minimal or no public input and deployed well ahead of privacy impact assessments, airports around the world are letting people know they can fly anywhere as long as they give up a bit of their freedom.

What's not expected is that the millions of images gathered by hundreds of cameras will just be handed over to private tech companies by the government that collected them. That's what happened in South Korea, where facial images (mostly of foreign nationals) were bundled up and given to private parties without ever informing travelers this had happened (or, indeed, would be happening).

The South Korean government handed over roughly 170 million photographs showing the faces of South Korean and foreign nationals to the private sector without their consent, ostensibly for the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) system to be used for screening people entering and leaving the country, it has been learned.

The agency carelessly handing out millions of facial images to private tech companies was the country's Ministry of Justice. Ironically enough, South Korean privacy activists (as well as some of the millions contained in the database) say this action is exactly the opposite of "justice."

While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a “human rights disaster” that is relatively unprecedented.  

“It’s unheard-of for state organizations—whose duty it is to manage and control facial recognition technology—to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology,” six civic groups said during a press conference last week.

The project -- one with millions of unaware participants -- began in 2019. The MOJ is in the process of obtaining better facial recognition tech to arm its hundreds of airport cameras with. To accomplish this, it apparently decided the private sector should take everything cameras had collected so far and use those images to train facial recognition AI.

The public was never informed of this by the Ministry of Justice. It took another government employee to deliver the shocking news. National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested information from the Ministry about its "Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction" project and received this bombshell in return.

Maybe the government felt this was okay because most of the images were of non-citizens. This is from South Korean news agency Hankyoreh, which broke the story:

Of the facial data transferred from the MOJ for use by private companies last year as part of this project, around 120 million images were of foreign nationals.

Companies used 100 million of these for “AI learning” and another 20 million for “algorithm testing.” The MOJ possessed over 200 million photographs showing the faces of approximately 90 million foreign nationals as of 2018, meaning that over half of them were used for learning.

With two-thirds of the freebie images being of foreigners, perhaps the South Korean government thought it would lower its incoming litigation footprint. But that still leaves nearly 58 million images of its own citizens. And there's nothing preventing foreign citizens from suing the South Korean government, even though this action can sometimes be considerably more expensive than suing locally.

Lawsuits are coming, though, according to Motherboard.

Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit.

The legal basis for the collection isn't being challenged. It's the distribution of the collected images, which no travelers expressly agreed to. Precedent isn't on the government's side.

“Internationally, it is difficult to find any precedent of actual immigration data from domestic and international travelers being provided to companies and used for AI development without any notification or consent,” said Chang Yeo-Kyung, executive director of the Institute for Digital Rights.

It's pretty sad when democratic governments decide the people belong to the government, rather than the other way around. But as the march towards always-on surveillance continues in travel hubs and major cities, using members of the public as guinea pigs for AI development is probably going to become just as routine as the numerous, formerly-novel, impositions placed on travelers shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

Filed Under: biometrics, facial recognition, privacy, south korea, surveillance

Daily Deal: Speakly

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Speakly is the fastest way to learn a language. The app combines science and computational algorithms to teach you the 4,000 most statistically relevant words of your target language in order of their importance. Learn different languages such as Estonian, English, Russian, Spanish, and more. Speakly allows you to practice real-life situations right from your smartphone or computer, building your confidence when speaking a foreign language in their everyday life. It's on sale for $70.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing

from the no,-no,-it's-the-kids-who-are-wrong dept

I will admit that, until this morning, I had never heard of Ridley Scott's movie The Last Duel. It was released this fall in theaters only, which is a bold move while we're still dealing with a raging pandemic in which most people still don't want to go sit in a movie theater. And so, the box office results for the movie were somewhat weak. Indeed, it's now Scott's worst performing movie at the box office.

The issue, as many pointed out, was that The Last Duel was targeted at older movie-goers. A historical period piece film about a duel in France? Not exactly a hit among the youth market, and older folks are still the most concerned about COVID (which makes sense, considering it's a lot more deadly the older you get).

A few weeks ago, Scott admitted he was disappointed in the movie's performance at the box office, but compared it to Blade Runner, which also didn't immediately set the world on fire when it was released, and is now a classic.

But, now, having thought about it some more, Scott has decided that it must be Facebook and the kids these days who are at fault for not wanting to see his two and a half hour period piece epic. Going on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, Scott insisted that he had no problems with the way the film was marketed, but ripped into "millennials" (who, um, aren't as young as he seems to think they are) and... Facebook. Because if we've learned anything these days, it's that no matter what goes wrong with your life and plans, you can always blame Facebook for those failures:

“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cellphones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone,” Scott said.

“This is a broad stroke, but I think we’re dealing with it right now with Facebook,” Scott added. “This is a misdirection that has happened where it’s given the wrong kind of confidence to this latest generation, I think.”

I honestly don't even know what any of that means. People had "the wrong kind of confidence" and that's why they didn't want to sit in an enclosed theater for nearly 3 hours to watch a movie about two French guys fighting in the 14th century? And it's because Facebook didn't tell them to go? Does that mean that the movie's social media marketing wasn't well done? Or what?

Not everything is the fault of Facebook (or millennials). Sometimes, people just don't want to watch your movie.

Filed Under: marketing, millennials, ridley scott, social media, the last duel
Companies: facebook

FAA Blocks 5G Deployments Over Safety Concerns Despite No Actual Evidence Of Harm

from the evidence-optional dept

A few weeks back, both Verizon and AT&T announced they'd be pausing some aspects of their 5G deployments over FAA concerns that those deployments would create significant safety hazards. The problem: there's absolutely no evidence that those safety concerns are legitimate.

The FAA and airline industry claim that use of the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz "C-Band" spectrum to deploy 5G wireless creates interference for avionics equipment (specifically radio altimeters). But the FCC has closely examined the claims and found no evidence of actual harm anywhere in the world, where more than 40 countries have deployed C-band spectrum for 5G use. Just to be sure, the FCC set aside a 220 MHz guard band that will remain unused as a sort of buffer to prevent this theoretical interference (double the amount Boeing requested).

None of this was enough for the FAA. That's of major annoyance to AT&T and Verizon, which paid $45.45 billion and $23.41 billion respectively earlier this year for C-band spectrum, and have been widely and justifiably critcized for underwhelming 5G network performance and availability so far. Consumer advocates and policy experts like Harold Feld are also confused as to why the FAA continues to block deployment in these bands despite no evidence of actual harm:

"...the technical evidence on which the FAA bases its interference concerns have a lot of problems — not least of which that about 40 other countries operate similar 5G deployments in the same C-Band without any interference showing up. Either physics works differently in the U.S., or the report at the center of this controversy needs to explain why this hasn’t shown up in any other country where deployments are either authorized or have already taken place."

Not only did the FAA block the deployment of 5G in the C-band based on what appears to be nonexistent evidence of harm, Feld suggests that while the FAA has been leaking their concerns to the Wall Street Journal, they've simultaneously refused to hand over needed data to the FCC (you know, the agency that actually has expertise in wireless spectrum deployment and use).

As Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica notes, the FAA's own November 2 bulletin (pdf) states there's no "proven reports of harmful interference" with C-Band 5G deployments anywhere in the world. As Feld notes, the entire fracas (which began during the Trump era and continues until now) should be remedied once the FCC is finally fully staffed:

"If nothing else, this exercise should make it abundantly clear why the Senate needs to confirm Davison, Rosenworcel and Sohn as quickly as possible. We cannot have spectrum disputes between agency fought out in the press in ways that destabilize confidence in the safety of air travel. Federal policy at this level is not a game of chicken, and cannot be fought out like this in the press. We need the key agencies here at full strength and able to resolve the systemic problem — not just the existing problem."

In the interim, the dumb squabble will just contribute to the existing din of gibberish about how 5G is a health and safety hazard. Evidence of most of these claims remains entirely optional.

Filed Under: 5g, c-band, faa, safety, wireless
Companies: at&t, verizon

Baltimore Police Department Sued For Seizing Phones, Cash, And Jewelry From Crime Victims Recovering From Shootings

from the adding-insulting-of-rights-to-shooting-injuries dept

It's not enough that law enforcement can seize property if it pretends it must be linked to some criminal endeavor, even if the cops can't be bothered to actually find any direct evidence of said criminal endeavor… or even bring charges against forfeiture victims. It's not enough that almost anything can be seized when accompanied by criminal charges, which can lead to officers stripmining someone's residence while serving warrants.

When alleged criminals are difficult to find, sometimes the cops just take stuff from crime victims. Multiple people are suing the Baltimore Police Department for grabbing all sorts of property from shooting victims while they were hospitalized and recovering from their injuries.

It would seem these seizures would be illegal, but the Baltimore PD pretends it's all about rounding up evidence -- even when said "evidence" has nothing to do with the crime being investigated.

On an unusually warm spring evening in the early days of Covid-19, Amber Spencer turned out to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday at a front stoop cookout in East Baltimore.

Suddenly, bullets flew, hitting her in the chest. When she turned to run, a bullet struck the back of her head and lodged itself in her skull. Then Spencer lost consciousness.

“When I came to, I had been shot in the head. I asked, ‘Where’s my phone?’ and my mom said, ‘The police took it,’” she said.

And once this property is gone, it's gone. The BPD has no interest in giving up what it's taken, even if the crime is no longer being investigated.

To date, none of the plaintiffs or their loved ones have been able to get their property back even though none of the four is accused of a crime.

It's not just phones. It's whatever crime victims happened to have on them when they were assaulted by actual criminals. This is from the lawsuit [PDF] seeking to have these seizures found unconstitutional.

Plaintiff Damon Gray is a 23-year-old Black man who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On June 29, 2019, a stranger shot Mr. Gray approximately seven times in the back, neck, and chest while Mr. Gray was walking in and around Catherine Street in the southwest area of Baltimore. Mr. Gray was transported by ambulance to the hospital where BPD officers seized without consent his cell phone, a bracelet, a necklace, and several articles of clothing. These items remain in BPD custody.

While it's possible the clothing might have some evidentiary relevance in terms of recreating the crime and performing ballistic examinations, it's difficult to see how a phone adds anything to the evidentiary mix, much less the victim's jewelry.

This isn't an aberration.

Plaintiff Amber Spencer is a 27-year-old Black woman who resides in the County of Baltimore, Maryland. Just before midnight on March 20, 2020, a stranger shot Ms. Spencer in the head and chest while she was attending a cookout near 1800 North Chapel Street in Baltimore, Maryland. After the shooting, Ms. Spencer was transported by ambulance to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where BPD officers seized her personal property without her consent, including her cell phone, jeans, shirt, shoes, car key, and approximately $400 in U.S. currency. These items remain in BPD custody.

The same questions are raised here, but with the addition of shoes (the victim was shot in the chest and head), car keys, yet another phone, and $400 in cash that cannot possibly have anything to do with the criminal act being investigated.

Plaintiff Faye Cottman is a 36-year-old Black woman who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On March 14, 2019, a woman that Ms. Cottman did not know shot Ms. Cottman and her then-11-year-old son in the head while he was playing with his brother at a playground in the Cherry Hill area of Baltimore, Maryland. BPD officers arrived at the scene and seized Ms. Cottman’s personal property without consent, including her jacket, cell phone, wig, and shoes. Despite numerous unsuccessful attempts to reclaim her personal property from BPD, these items remain in BPD custody.

Once again, this appears to be BPD officers taking all of a hospitalized person's belongings and then refusing to return them.

One more time:

Plaintiff Audrey Carter is a 58-year-old Black woman who resides in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. On June 9, 2018, her son, Dwayne D. Cheeks, was shot and killed in the 2200 Block of Germania Avenue in Baltimore City. BPD officers seized, inventoried, and logged in the Evidence Control Unit (“ECU”) all of Mr. Cheeks’s effects, including his driver’s license, cell phone, a lottery ticket, keys, and cash.

In this case, the victim's mother was able to talk the BPD into giving her back her son's cash. That happened in December 2019, a year-and-a-half after officers took control of it. The BPD refused to give back anything else officers took. Worse, the department claimed the rest of "evidence" officers had seized had been destroyed.

Not only did officers take property, but they took advantage of unconscious shooting victims in other ways. Faye Cottman's phone was warrantlessly searched by officers while she recovered from surgery. The officers claimed the phone was "evidence," remarked that they were able to search "pretty far back" in her messages to see if she had had any communications with the shooting suspect, and then refused to give the phone back despite closing the investigation in September 2019.

In some cases, victims were not given inventory lists of the property seized or any receipt showing the BDP had taken their property, making it extremely difficult to talk the department into giving them back their stuff. In other cases, officers and detectives stonewalled requests, citing COVID policies or ongoing investigations. Even when investigations concluded, the BPD made no effort to return seized property. And, in the case described above, the BPD destroyed property officers knew was being sought by its previous owners, in direct contravention of their own evidence policies.

The justifications for these seizures don't work. And if the BPD expects crime victims to believe officers are operating in good faith, it would ensure property is returned as soon as an investigation concludes. It would also seek consent from fully cognizant crime victims, rather than stripping them of their belongings while they undergo surgery or recover from their wounds. And if they really need to see the contents of someone's phone, they need to obtain warrants supported by probable cause, rather than taking advantage of situations where crime victims can't actually provide consent to engage in warrantless searches.

Filed Under: baltimore, baltimore pd, civil asset forfeiture, evidence, police, theft